PHP Tips to Enhance Your Web Application Performance!

Enhancing your web application’s performance is not an easy task. You always need to put several efforts in different areas of PHP application while development and post-development as well, according to its nature.

PHP 7.x is well-equipped with all the necessary tools and components for performance benchmarks that were missing in the older versions. Using this latest version of PHP, you can easily create an application for your business that you can easily optimize for better performance.

Apart from default capabilities, you can also use some simple tips in your PHP application code to strengthen its performance. Proper use of its native functions, caching systems, PHP-FPM, and JSON except XML can also give you a great advantage.

In this writing, I will discuss a few tips that you can follow in your PHP code to enhance your web application performance for greater revenues. Let’s begin!

Integrate PHP OPcache & win over performance

OPcache comes packaged with your PHP versions (5.x and latest ones). You need to enable it manually for the previous PHP versions.

It allows you to improve web applications’ performance by removing the server load to parse scripts on every request. This script works directly with the code compiling process. In general, when you compile code in PHP, the displayed code is converted to ML (machine language) and further takes time to accumulate all other scripts.

This way your PHP powered web application is taking a lot of time while slowing down the speed for end users. For an appropriate integration of OPcache, you need to <a href="https://www.brihaspatitech.com/hire-php-developer/">hire PHP developer<a/> so that you can ensure accurate results.
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Otherwise, you can also add a few lines of code (as shown below) in php.ini (if you are technically sound).

![1111.png](https://qiita-image-store.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/0/189649/0b74fd2a-19ff-ac4c-b441-be06a14c9309.png)

If this path contains spaces, you can wrap it in quotes like,

![image.png](https://qiita-image-store.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/0/189649/ce590606-174d-3c8a-1013-8c4b8cf58d45.png)

In case of queries, it is always advisable to consult PHP experts rather than ruining your code with experiments.

Update PHP Versions

It has always been recommended by several experts to keep your software updated with latest PHP versions. Every new PHP version comes with a lot of new enhancements and upgrades. In this manner, you can always overcome the difficulties or performance issues faced with the previous versions of PHP.

If you conduct a performance test of an old version of PHP with PHP 7.x, you will always get a fact that it is a way better to upgrade versions. Therefore, you should always update PHP versions to avoid breaking your application for further tweaks.

Static Script Minification

PHP is not a sole tool to build your complete web application. Instead, you will be utilizing many other scripts like JS, CSS, HTML, etc. They also contribute a significant role in your applications’ performance.

Minifying such static scripts can help you reduce in processing time and eventually a fast loading application. You can perform manual steps like minimizing server requests, Load order optimization, minimizing downloadable elements’ size, merging, minifying and refreshing JavaScript and CSS files, etc.

However, you don’t need to perform a manual process every time. You can utilize some easily available tools like JavaScript Minifier or JS & CSS Script Optimizer, etc.

NOTE- I don’t intend to promote any kind of online performance optimization tool here.

WRAPPING UP

These are a few valuable tips that I have collected from my personal research on internet, that are quite useful to enhance the performance of PHP application.

If you have any kind of concern or query, do let me know. I would be delighted to assist you with my knowledge and expertise.